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A recent coinage within international relations, “nation branding” designates the process of highlighting a country’s positive characteristics for promotional purposes, using techniques similar to those employed in marketing and public relations. Nation Branding in Modern History takes an innovative approach to illuminating this contested concept, drawing on fascinating case studies in the United States, China, Poland, Suriname, and many other countries, from the nineteenth century to the present. It supplements these empirical contributions with a series of historiographical essays and analyses of key primary documents, making for a rich and multivalent investigation into the nexus of cultural marketing, self-representation, and political power.
"By examining a broad range of individuals and institutions engaged in international cooperation in the Alps in the 1920s and 1930s, this book explains how internationalists constructed and used emotions to attain their goals. It undertakes a journey through the most diverse terrains and venues, from the international art exhibitions and congresses organized by the Union Internationale des Associations d'Alpinisme (also known as UIAA, or the International Mountaineering and Climbing Federation), to the summer camps and schools run by transnational bodies such as the League for Open-Air Education, to the international sanatoria for students, workers, and soldiers healing from tuberculosis in ...
From the Napoleonic Wars to the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, via the great world conflicts of the 20th century, Music and Postwar Transitions in the 19th and 20th Centuries is the first book to highlight the significance of ‘postwar transitions’ in the field of music and to demonstrate the influence that musicians, composers, critics, institutions, and publics have had on the period that follows conflict. Leading historians, political scientists, psychologists and musicologists explore the roles of music and culture in demobilization, reconstruction, memory, reconciliation, revenge, and nationalist backlash. Moving beyond the popular conception of music as an agent of peace, this study reveals music’s more complex and ambivalent role in the process of transition from war to peace.
Bringing together scholars from the fields of musicology and international history, this book investigates the significance of music to foreign relations, and how it affected the interaction of nations since the late 19th century. For more than a century, both state and non-state actors have sought to employ sound and harmony to influence allies and enemies, resolve conflicts, and export their own culture around the world. This book asks how we can understand music as an instrument of power and influence, and how the cultural encounters fostered by music changes our ideas about international history.
In this absorbing account of the origins of the Asia-Pacific War, historian John Gripentrog argues that competing ideologies of world order—chiefly the rift between liberal internationalism and Pan-Asian regionalism—lay at the heart of the conflict. Drawing from a rich diversity of primary and secondary sources, the author also examines the Japanese government’s vigorous cultural diplomacy in the U.S., which sought to win over American hearts and minds and soft-pedal its imperialist ambitions in Asia. The result is a book that both challenges and amplifies standard interpretations of US-Japan relations in the interwar era, while weaving diplomatic, political, intellectual, and cultural history. Moreover, the author’s wide-angle lens offers readers insights into a fascinating assemblage of historical actors—from Japanese and American diplomats, politicians, and military leaders, to cosmopolitan art enthusiasts and major league baseball players.
A country’s stature in global politics is often determined by its popular image and public perceptions, as reflected in global media. While ‘nation branding’ as a term and a tool of analysis in Social Sciences has emerged prominently since the 1990s, the practice of ‘positive’ projection of states, regions and locality along with non-state institutions has deeper historical roots. Apart from nation branding, the cultural turn in ‘International Relations’ has led to popularisation of analytical concepts like ‘soft power’ and ‘civilisation’ or ‘civilisational states.’ The present work focuses on two of these concepts: ‘nation branding’ and ‘civilisation state’...
As an early experiment in the creation of multilateral institutions, the League of Nations was entrusted by its members to maintain peace but also to be a standard-maker and a manager of contemporary problems and challenges requiring a global response. Nevertheless, after a while it became clear that its performance in addressing major conflicts did not live up to the expectations of guarantying collective security. In the functional areas, although the organization created precedents, it also showed limitations. Due to its complexity, increasingly the League of Nations has been studied not only from an institutional perspective but also from a more multidimensional and comparative point of view that allows to consider the presence and role of the organization in various scales and spaces, besides its relationship with a diversity of actors and themes. The League of Nations Experience: Overlapping Readings offers a multitude of interpretations, evincing some of the promising avenues through which the League of Nations continues to inspire academic research.
This book offers a critical reflection of the historical genesis, transformation, and problématique of “humanity” in the transatlantic world, with a particular eye on cultural representations. “Humanity,” the essays show, was consistently embedded in networks of actors and cultural practices, and its meanings have evolved in step with historical processes such as globalization, cultural imperialism, the transnationalization of activism, and the spread of racism and nationalism. Visions of Humanity applies a historical lens on objects, sounds, and actors to provide a more nuanced understanding of the historical tensions and struggles involved in constructing, invoking, and instrumentalizing the “we” of humanity.
This major new volume presents innovative recent scholarship on Japan's modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. An international team of leading scholars offer accessible and thought-provoking essays that present an expansive global vision of the archipelago's history from c. 1868 to the twenty-first century. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens, capturing international attention ever since. These Japanese efforts to reshape global hierarchies powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan's shores. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, this volume highlights Japan's distinctive and fast-changing history.